Interactions between hosts and their pathogens are numerous and come in so many forms that we continue to categorize them to this day. A unique example often seen in insects is the capability known as polyphenism, where two or more different phenotypes, or physical traits, can emerge from the same genome. This is commonly seen […]
Some pathogens are content to focus on their one host and live in their niche of evolutionary propagation. They go about their ongoing generational fight to one-up their host, just as their host works to outperform and prevent infection by the pathogen. Occasionally, one of these sorts of pathogens will branch off and appropriate one […]
Tracking plant pathogens is no simple matter. Due to their possible environmental hidey holes being in the soil, the air, other plants, or the host plants themselves lying dormant, any and every possibility must be accounted for. And the triggers that begin active pathogenicity and harm to the plant is connected to a convoluted system […]
The health of plants is paramount for farmers, gardeners, and scientists alike. They not only provide the food we need to survive, but their overall well-being is a marker for the strength of the environmental conditions around them. And there are many things, much like with us humans, that can be a cause for alarm. […]
The process of beer-making is complicated. The brewing process has an array of steps that need to be followed fairly precisely or you risk ruining the flavor of your concoction. A general description of the process is that brewer’s yeast, usually specially cultivated strains of the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is used along with sugars […]
When dealing with plants in a lab, in a garden, or in an agricultural field, we often forget that there was originally a whole biome that those plants were involved in in the wild. We often try to simulate those conditions to the best of our capabilities, but there is still so much knowledge we […]
With the great strides and advances in medicine that have been brought to the stage in the past several decades and especially in the past ten years, there has been a shift in focus and perspective in the pharmacological community. Previously, the task had been to develop medicines to treat conditions big and small or, […]
We think about them in a ton of different ways. Fungi can be a delicacy in food or they can be a deadly poison. They are beneficial mutualists with plants or harmful parasitic pests. But there is one more feature of theirs that has become more and more prominent in recent decades with the emergence […]
Drought continues to be a primary driver of famine and crop loss around the world, with the accompanied water shortages not only affecting food production, but also drinking water availability. It is predicted that, by 2025, over two and a half billion people will be facing those sort of water shortages, especially as the effects […]
Ethnobotany is one of those fields that encompasses more than just itself. It is larger than the sum of its parts. Connected to the wider field of ethnobiology, it relates to all of its other sister fields, like ethnoentomology, ethnozoology, and ethnomycology. And discussing just those misses out on the various other culture specific fields […]
